On the Discursive Nature of the Proper Name

Abstract

The discursive approach focuses the attention on the speech-thinking activity of a perceiving subject, and the proper name itself is considered not just as a collapsed text, but a compression of many texts forming the discursive field of the onym. The name contains a multi-layered information that forms the proper name’s discourse and it can be identified through the discursive experiment. This experiment included 3 stages. The 1t stage allowed us to model the associative field of the onym and identify the mechanisms producing associations. They are phonetic, derivational, paradigmatic and syntagmatic mechanisms. At the 2nd stage, statements of a contact nature (dialogues) were received. The statements deploy in the fields, connected with the cognitive activity of recipients: the field of events, the field of background knowledge, the field of estimation and the field of attribution. The 3d stage of the experiment was connected with the modeling of non-contact speech acts (monologues) of an onymic nature. The received texts of fantasy nature were divided into 4 groups: 1) text-assumption; 2) text-association; 3) text-knowledge; 4) text-pragmatics.